Getting close to release Texas Alpha1.
When finished we will move on to Texas Alpha 2.
We are breaking the alpha into more bite sized chunks so we can keep a stable version of the game out and still be able to break the game to work on new features and core changes.
These are the current bugs slated as blocking Alpha 1 Release. Bitbucket.org Texas Alpha 1 Release Candidate
Here are some highlights for whats in the current alpha.
In Game Version Checker
on the main menu there is a button to check the version.
the current version will be at the top of the list of version shown.
the version you are running will be in the title of the window. if the version you are running isnt on the the list then you have an old version.
clicking on a version will download it but you have to then run the installer yourself.
this also works for supported mods such as Combined Arms.
More Aggressive AI
The AI invasion code has had a lot of bugs squished and some other improvements done. the AI should be a lot more aggressive than in previous versions of blackbox. A lot more.
how that translates into game difficulty im not sure yet but you will be more likely to be killed.
this is especially true on the brutal difficulty where the previous limits on fleet size were removed allowing the AI to bring much large fleets to attack.
Many Crash Fixes
While we have put in a crash recovery loop into the game these did cause the game to crash internally. Many of these have been fixed or handled to prevent them from corrupting the game play. For the most part crash to desktops should be rare. What should happen is that the automated reporting catches the crash and the game recovers. these crashes should be being sent to sentry.io for reporting. By going through these crashes and attempting to fix them we can reduce these and all the player has to do to make this happen is play the game.
What Can You Do To Help.
Well... besides just playing the game there are a few things. We are always looking for people interested in coding, and that is open to all levels of code skill even people that want to learn to code, but there is more than that.
Player input on what we should focus on in Alpha 2 would be good. What really needs to be fixed/expanded.
Testing specific issues and generating solid steps to reproduce issues.
in Alpha2 or Alpha3 we are going to rebuild the event system and will want to start getting the story on. Start bringing the galaxy alive. So story and event ideas are welcome and we have a discord channel devoted to that topic.
Strategy and design discussions. How do you beat the AI. Can you break it down into steps. We might be able to take your ideas and turn it into AI code.
Bring older unsupported mods back to life. There are a few mods out there that could use some attention and bug fixing to bring them back to life such as McShooterz excellent work on Star Trek Shattered Alliance. Would really love to see this mod get some love. The Klingon D7 battle cruiser is one of my favorite ship models. The bugs need to be shaken out and maybe some scripts written and some changes done to allow the new in game version system to work. There are others as well.
Encouragement. Yes its cheesy as all hell but words of encouragement and praise for the parts of the changes you like do mean a fair amount to budding programmers and designers. Feel free to drop us a line on discord or steam or here or wherever you like where we can listen. Yes criticism is OK too. :p
Excellent work...nice to see your making great strides with the game...
depending on how well this goes... texas 2 will be way better.
Well either way your effort and work is very much appreciated...
amazed people are still putting in work to make this game what it should have been, keep it up guys that's some serious commitment!